Subject: [dnsext] BOF on variants for ICANN San Francisco

From: Kim Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 10:10:36 -0800

Dear colleagues,

We are holding an informal birds-of-a-feather type meeting at the ICANN meeting in San Francisco. The idea is to discuss the work ongoing in both ICANN and IETF circles, and brainstorm how the work in both groups can benefit one another. A goal for the discussion is to identify how to best allocate resources to avoid duplicate work, as well as having ICANN's work help guide the IETF's scope of work, and vice versa.

Anyone with an interest in the discussions on variant issues within the IETF and ICANN is welcome to attend.

The meeting will be held at 2pm on Thursday 17 March. The room is called Elizabethan D in the meeting venue, the Westin on Union Square.

Also note there is a more formal, scheduled meeting on the agenda to discuss ICANN variant issues, specifically presenting case studies from different regions that may require variant solutions. This is separate to this BOF and is being held at Wednesday at 3pm (see http://svsf40.icann.org/node/22193). We will recap any relevant discussion from that meeting briefly in the BOF.

kim
(On behalf of ICANN's staff variant project team)

_______________________________________________
dnsext mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsext

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:19:11 -0500

I commend ICANN's staff variant project team for communicating (via 
Kim) a notice to the DNSEXT WG.

I can recall no prior ICANN organized "IDN" activity to which an open 
invitation to the DNS (or IDN) technical community was offered -- 
every such activity I contributed to was due to accidental discovery 
on my part, not an invitation by ICANN.

So that is an improvement.

Unfortunately, the less than useful "variant" nomenclature is used, so 
one has to guess, assuming one differentiates between the issues 
presented by two very large character repertoires with a large 
intersection, character repertoires with sparse sub-repertoires of 
positionally dependent combining characters, character repertoires 
with pervasive diacriticals, or character repertoires with sparse or 
singleton pairs, the actual scope of work to be allocated to ICANN or 
the IETF.

That is a non-improvement.

Unfortunately also, the temporal properties of "synchronized domains", 
the result of some prior, and limited consultation between 
participants to both the IETF and ICANN, is not noted as very 
difficult to achieve and not removed from the possible areas of work 
to be undertaken, at least by an IETF WG.

Of course, absence of mention is possibly an improvement.

If arrangements for remote participation are made, I will participate.

Eric

P.S. Leveling both barrels at the innocent civilians presenting their 
l10n work from home using the i18n framework the IDN/IDNAbis WG's 
created ("case studies from different regions that may require variant 
solutions") is not a substitute for communicating policy issues with 
ICANN or a hard to identify ambiguous requirements author. A co-chair, 
you know who you are, please take note.
_______________________________________________
dnsext mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsext

---

From: Doug Barton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:36:56 -0800

On 03/09/2011 11:19, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
> I commend ICANN's staff variant project team for communicating (via Kim)
> a notice to the DNSEXT WG.
>
> invitation to the DNS (or IDN) technical community was offered -- every
> such activity I contributed to was due to accidental discovery on my
> part, not an invitation by ICANN.

One can pontificate on length at all the various individuals or groups 
that need/deserve special invitations to such an event. Or, one could 
realize that ICANN has been holding regular, public, and well-publicized 
events on the IDN topic since no later than 2004 (which is the first 
time I participated as a staff member).

> positionally dependent combining characters, character repertoires with
> pervasive diacriticals, or character repertoires with sparse or

ICANN meetings are primarily populated by policy-focused individuals, 
not technologists. An expectation that such individuals would develop 
the level of technical knowledge described above is not rational. 
Further, the term "variant" has a relatively well understood meaning in 
the TLD policy context, where it is generally understood to be a 
simplification of several thorny technical problems.

On the other hand, you and I agree that the fact ICANN is continuing to 
reach out the the technical community on this topic is a good thing.

> the result of some prior, and limited consultation between participants
> to both the IETF and ICANN, is not noted as very difficult to achieve
> and not removed from the possible areas of work to be undertaken, at
> least by an IETF WG.

I don't think anyone involved thinks it's an easy problem, but maybe it 
hasn't been removed "from the possible areas of work to be undertaken" 
because some of us are actually working on it. :)

hth,

Doug

-- 

	Nothin' ever doesn't change, but nothin' changes much.
			-- OK Go

	Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS.
	Yours for the right price.  :)  http://SupersetSolutions.com/

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:07:59 -0500

On 3/9/11 2:36 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
> One can pontificate on length ...

I'm relieved to learn my observations were unnecessary, and that 
"variant" has a single, clear and unambiguous meaning.

I look forward to your prompt solution of problems that have been 
beyond my poor means, and am grateful for the recovery of next 
Thursday's 2pm hour.

Eric

---

From: Doug Barton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:13:24 -0800

On 03/09/2011 11:36, Doug Barton wrote:
> One can pontificate on length at all the various

Oy ... I looked at that 3 times before sending and still didn't see that 
the reason it looked weird was that I'd transposed on/at.

Doug (why is dyslexia so hard to spell?)

--

---

From: Doug Barton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:13:58 -0800

On 03/09/2011 12:07, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
> I'm relieved to learn my observations were unnecessary

Glad I could help. :)

--

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 15:16:47 -0500

No hat.

> simplification of several thorny technical problems.

I suspect I disagree with the above claim.  Specifically, I think I
disagree with "well understood".

In my experience, terms that have inherently ambiguous meaning are
almost never well understood.  It is of course possible to understand
ambiguity -- we wouldn't the word if we couldn't -- but in a wide
array of cases, I think ambiguous terms are badly understood by their
users.

I also believe that part of the reason we are struggling with the
aliasing discussion is exactly that very careful needs assessment is
extremely hard.  It is made all the harder by the unfortunate re-use
of the term "Variant", which has a well-defined meaning in the context
of "Character Variant Table" from RFC 3743.  Attempting to simplify
such thorny technical problems by lumping them all together under one
term seems like a good idea, but it turns out not to be.

It is often useful to bundle together a bunch of topics and call them
by a more generic name.  (Patents and copyrights are vastly different
areas of the law, and yet it is sometimes useful to talk about
"intellectual property".  Philosophers and English scholars can often
barely stand to be in the same room with each other, and yet they can
all be professors of the Humanities.)  For the present discussion
about dealing with different labels (which happen to correspond to
particular bits of natural language that "mean the same" or something
like that), however, I think conflating these cases makes our task
much harder.  It has caused no small degree of mischief in the TLD
policy arena, where in-principle solvable and necessarily unsolvable
problems are sometimes spoken of as though they were the same.

As perhaps the more technical end of an interchange with policy people
at an ICANN meeting, those of us who care about this topic could help
(in my opinion) a great deal just by teasing apart these ambiguities
and trying to ensure that every time a term is used, it is used
univocally.  It might be painful, but in anticipation of the
conversation we plan to have in Prague, it will no doubt help
crystallize which issues are clear (so we can decide whether we know
what to do), and which issues we do not yet understand. 

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]
Shinkuro, Inc.

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:18:02 -0500

>> I'm relieved to learn my observations were unnecessary

Your claim is that you've got clue. Prove it.
_______________________________________________
dnsext mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsext

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 20:04:25 +0000

thought the IETF has some rules about holding out of sequence meetings...  since you have
 used the IETF wg ml to announce this mtg, I presume the IETF "Note Well" rules apply?

--bill

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:40:05 -0800

> disagree with "well understood".

+1. I would go further to say "people who think they understand it 
clearly are either thinking that most other people don't share that 
understanding, or are ignoring the history written on the pages of many 
IETF mailing lists".

I would have much preferred ICANN staff to have chosen a word that 
reflects the still-rampant lack of a good term.

---

From: Alex Bligh <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:48:49 +0000

> reflects the still-rampant lack of a good term.

I suggest "alias" / "aliases" to mean DNs that broadly "do the same thing"
as
1. It's the term used in draft-aliasing-requirements
2. It's not used (as far as I know) by any existing proposed solution and
   so is not specific
3. As far as I know, it is not an existing term of art in DNS, Unicode, or
   ICANNalia

-- 
Alex Bligh

---

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Mar 2011 22:13:55 -0000

>> disagree with "well understood".

I think we understand our technical options pretty well, but not what
problem we're expected to solve.

At ICANN you're likely to run into policy types who say (no doubt in
more words) "spare me the mumbo-jumbo, we just want {set of names}
to work the same."

Once you're done gritting your teeth, this is an educational
opportunity to help people understand the large number of moving parts
that have to be synchonized to get the consistent user experience that
is probably the intutive idea of sameness, e.g.:

If users type various names into their web browser, what should they
expect? Always the same page? How about if some pages are different?
How about if one brings up a page, the rest don't? etc.

R's,
John

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 17:43:07 -0500

> How about if one brings up a page, the rest don't? etc.

I completely agree.  I'm very enthusiastic about this opportunity, I'm
delighted ICANN is organizing it, and I just changed my travel plans
in order to be able to make it.  Now I just have to break the news to
my wife!

A

---

From: Doug Barton <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:48:22 -0800

Kim,

I'm looking at the remote participation schedule 
(http://svsf40.icann.org/svsf40/remote-schedule) and I'm not seeing this 
meeting on it. Hopefully that will change, and if it does can you let us 
know? :)  I think that there would be a tremendous benefit from having 
an open door into how the ICANN community looks at this problem.

Doug

On 03/09/2011 10:10, Kim Davies wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> We are holding an informal birds-of-a-feather type meeting at the ICANN
> meeting in San Francisco. The idea is to discuss the work ongoing in
> both ICANN and IETF circles, and brainstorm how the work in both groups
> can benefit one another. A goal for the discussion is to identify how to
> best allocate resources to avoid duplicate work, as well as having
> ICANN's work help guide the IETF's scope of work, and vice versa.
>
> The meeting will be held at *2pm on Thursday 17 March*. The room is
> called Elizabethan D in the meeting venue, the Westin on Union Square.
>
> Also note there is a more formal, scheduled meeting on the agenda to
> discuss ICANN variant issues, specifically presenting case studies from
> different regions that may require variant solutions. This is separate
> to this BOF and is being held at Wednesday at 3pm (see
> http://svsf40.icann.org/node/22193). We will recap any relevant
> discussion from that meeting briefly in the BOF.
>
> kim

--

---

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Mar 2011 22:58:59 -0000

>an open door into how the ICANN community looks at this problem.

Agreed.  I can't be in S.F. this week, but I'd be happy to participate
remotely.

R's,
John

---

From: Doug Barton <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:07:03 -0800

> disagree with "well understood".

Specifically, please read what you quoted above again. :)  I stand by 
that statement.

> array of cases, I think ambiguous terms are badly understood by their

I think that a lot of the ambiguity in _this group_ about the term 
"variants" derives from attempting to define it with a sort of technical 
rigorousness that people in ICANN do not use (or in many cases, desire). 
That said, I studiously avoided use of the word "variant" in my CLONE 
draft because I know that it causes confusion here.

OTOH, if you were to sit down with people from the ICANN sphere, 
particularly those who are familiar with IDNs in the TLD context, you'd 
get a very consistent definition of the term "variant," whether you felt 
it was sufficiently technically precise or not. Thus my statement above.

> term seems like a good idea, but it turns out not to be.

And I have argued in the past that while I'm fully supportive of 
defining requirements as rigorously as possible I think we may need to 
accept definitions of both "rigorous" and "possible" that may be "less" 
than what we're used to. OTOH I think that my experience dealing with 
the ICANN crowd gives me a pretty good understanding of the problems 
they are trying to solve, and I've already said that I think the new 
aliasing draft captures them pretty well.

> problems are sometimes spoken of as though they were the same.

If your goal is to get the ICANN community to stop using the term 
"variant" to refer to the problem that they know to be defined by the 
term, you're going to fail. It's far better to try and understand what 
they mean by "variant" and then try to figure out if we can provide a 
technical solution for it.

> what to do), and which issues we do not yet understand.

I agree that teasing apart the ambiguities is a good goal, however I 
hold absolutely no hope that any of "us" are going to get any of "them" 
to modify their language. It's too well ingrained at this point.

hth,

Doug

--

---

From: Doug Barton <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:11:49 -0800

On 03/09/2011 14:13, John Levine wrote:
> is probably the intutive idea of sameness

... or, it's an opportunity to ask the question, "What do you mean by 
'work the same?'"  :)  My experience with the "policy types" at ICANN is 
that generally they are very smart people who are open to discussion 
about where the technical boundaries are. You just have to be ready for 
them to push back on why, and where those boundaries can be moved.

Doug

--

---

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Mar 2011 23:39:07 -0000

>'work the same?'" 

They may well not know.  ("I mean the user should see the same
thing.")  That's why it could be useful to try and tease out what
their intuition is, e.g., what appears in a browser and so forth.

R's,
John

---

From: Doug Barton <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:18:47 -0800

> their intuition is, e.g., what appears in a browser and so forth.

I think we're talking about more or less the same thing. My point is 
simply that "What do you mean by that?" is likely to get a better 
response than "Let me tell you why what you just said makes no sense at 
all."  Obviously that's an extreme version, and I'm _not_ implying that 
this is how you personally would approach the situation. OTOH I have 
seen others from the technorati approach similar situations in just that 
manner, to the detriment of all concerned.

Doug

--

---

From: Kim Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:22:12 -0800

Hi Doug,

On 12/03/2011, at 2:48 PM, Doug Barton wrote:

This particular meeting was just designed to be an informal meeting for anyone with an interest that is present. It was conceived after the agenda-setting cut-off, and does not have logistics support for remote participation. Please consider this meeting only slightly more formal than everyone coalescing in the bar, as another opportunity to make use of folks with a common interest who happen to be in the same place at the same time.

The official ICANN session on variants is on Wednesday and is on the agenda, and as far as I know will be available remotely. I'd encourage participation in that.

Along with this request for remote participation, we've also received suggestions that there be a formal agenda, and this meeting be announced more widely and gather broad participation from other groups. To quote a colleague, "I don't think we should fall over ourselves at short notice to try and make this into a general meeting - we'll fail and mess up!"

If there is a need for a better organised meeting on the same topic then I am sure that is something that can be arranged at a later date. And of course there is the upcoming session in Prague.

cheers,

kim